Clover Coffee Maker

Next time you wait in line at the coffee shop, eavesdrop on
the other customers. You'll hear them calling out lots of
elaborate espresso orders, from nonfat vanilla lattes to
peppermint mochas with whipped cream. Accommodating baristas
bustle around pulling espresso shots, steaming milk, all so
you have your morning coffee exactly the way you like it.
Meanwhile, drip coffee sits forlornly in a pot in the back.
It could sit there for hours. It costs about a dollar. It's
functional, sure, and gets the job done when you need
a pick-me-up. But it's probably the least exciting thing in
the shop.

One machine aims to bring the glamour back to drip coffee:
the Clover coffee maker. It was developed in 2005 by the
Seattle-based Coffee Equipment Company. As opposed to a batch
brew that yields enough cups to get a business through the
morning rush, the Clover brews one cup of coffee at a time.
With a Clover, the barista and the customer can customize the
way the coffee tastes by tinkering with the water temperature
and the brewing time.

The result is not the kind of coffee you add milk or sugar
to, and it sure doesn't begin with anything instant. This
coffee maker has become a way to highlight coffee beans from
around the world, beans that may cost almost a hundred
dollars a pound. The Clover has coffee drinkers reaching into
a wine lover's vocabulary for words like earthy, citrusy and
spicy. Connoisseurs praise the floral undertones or deride
a grassy flavor, and café owners have found customers willing
to pay latte prices for drip coffees.

In 2006, the first year Clover was on the market, about 100
machines were sold to independent coffee shops, and sales
tripled the following year. Depending on where you live,
finding a Clover coffee maker might have been as difficult as
finding its four-leafed namesake. But you might be seeing
a lot more of them. In March 2008, Starbucks announced its
purchase of the Coffee Equipment Company. All future Clovers
will appear exclusively in Starbucks.

What does this mean for the coffee industry? Does the Clover
really produce better-tasting coffee, and even if it did,
would you pay five bucks for it? What can this machine do
that your coffee maker at home can't?

Clover Coffee: Building on French Presses and Vacuum Pots

The flavor of your coffee depends on two things -- how the
beans are roasted and how the drink is prepared. Roasting
packs the flavor potential into a coffee bean, while grinding
and brewing prepare the beans in a way that maximizes the
flavor. The Clover gives you control over the two brewing
factors that affect the flavor, which are the temperature of
the water and the dwell time, or the time in which the
grounds are in contact with the water.

The Clover uses a proportional integral derivative (PID)
controller to create the exact right temperature of water
every time. Even a change of a few degrees in water
temperature can make the difference between a cup of sludge
and a cup that highlights the flavor of the bean. If the
water is too hot, it will overextract the flavor of the beans,
resulting in a bitter taste, but if the water is not hot
enough, then you have underextraction and a weak cup of
coffee.

This coffee maker also lets you dial in the exact number of
seconds that the grounds are in contact with the water, and
the Clover's brewing process is designed to bring out the
best in the grounds. Let's look at how it compares with other
coffee-making methods.

Most people have an automatic drip coffee maker on their
kitchen counter -- it's fast, easy and gets them going in the
morning. Unfortunately, the drip coffee maker is not going to
win any awards for how the coffee tastes. These makers don't
heat the water enough or allow the grounds to interact with
the water for long enough to make the perfect cup of coffee.

T­o get the best-tasting coffee, coffee experts have long
agreed that you have to use a French press or a vacuum brewer.
Both of these methods allow for more control of the water
temperature and the brewing method than an automatic. To make
coffee in a French press, the grounds and almost-boiling water
steep for several minutes. The top of the French press has
a plunger that's attached to a mesh filter. When you push down
on the plunger, the screen separates the brewed coffee from
the grounds. The grounds are pushed to the bottom, and coffee
is poured out the top.

Vacuum pots are named for the air vacuum that's created
between its two connected globes to draw down the brewed
coffee. The bottom globe is placed on heat, which warms the
water within it. As the water heats and expands, the resulting
water vapor creates pressure that forces the rest of the water
into the top globe, where the ground coffee awaits. The vapor
also moves up, which heats the water and the coffee and
agitates it for a good brew. When the bottom globe is taken
off the heat, everything that rose up must now come down, so
the brewed coffee, minus the used grounds that are caught by
a filter, fills the bottom globe.

What does this have to do with how the Clover works? Well,
the Clover uses the best of both methods with its patented
VacuumPress Technology. The brewing happens in a steel brew
cylinder that sits atop a piston. When the brewing process
starts, the piston moves to its lowest position and a drain
valve at the bottom of the machine closes. After the coffee
steeps, an actuator forces the piston to rise with the used
grounds held by a perforated mesh screen, almost like a French
press in reverse. When it does this while the drain valve is
closed, a vacuum is created that draws down the brewed coffee.
The piston descends again, the drain valve opens and the
coffee enters the waiting cup.

Making Clover Coffee

You might have gotten the idea that the Clover is an
unattractive mix of pistons and valves, but it's a
sleek-looking machine that makes coffee brewing pretty fun to
watch. The Clover, despite the snazzy VacuumPress Technology
and PID controllers, still needs the help of a gifted barista.
Let's look at how Clover coffee is brewed, from start to
finish.

We're not starting with instant coffee with a Clover, as we
mentioned before. Likely, the café customer has a few whole
beans to choose from, and hopefully, a knowledgeable barista
to guide the choice. Let's say the customer picks some beans
from Kenya and would like an 8-ounce cup of coffee. The
barista will likely have a tip sheet, fine-tuned by Clover
and the coffee shop owners, which will contain the Clover
specifications that will produce the best cup of coffee with
this bean. On the front of the Clover is a knob that allows
the barista to change the settings, plugging in the cup size,
the time that the coffee should brew and the temperature of
the water.

The barista doses, or measures, the beans, and then grinds
them fresh. Human error or a faulty grinder could actually
screw up the perfect cup of coffee that the Clover promises.
The size of the grind affects how much flavor can be
extracted. It varies from bean to bean and is dependent on
how long the coffee will brew.

When the coffee is ground, it's poured into the brew chamber
at the top of the machine. As we mentioned in the last
section, this is basically a filter atop a piston. Behind the
brew chamber is a water boiler, and the water pours from
a spigot into the chamber. The barista stirs the mixture,
ensuring that the ­grounds are thoroughly moistened. This is
the other step where human interaction can affect the taste
of the coffee; debates rage on barista message boards about
the best way to stir the grounds. The stirring ensures that
the grounds are completely wet and helps to extract the
flavor from them.

Then the brewing begins. What someone can see from the
outside is the top of the bubbling coffee rising and falling,
but as we learned in the last section, pistons are rising and
falling, grounds are being pushed up and coffee is being sent
out through the valves. The whole thing is over before you
know it -- brewing takes about 40 seconds.
Up top, the grounds form a cake that can be easily wiped into
the waste bin at the top of the machine.

Quick brewing and easy cleanup are two of the selling points
of a Clover, especially in comparison to the more cumbersome
French presses and vacuum brewers. But even if you love your
French press or vacuum brewer, the Clover is set apart by
that ability to regulate so many different factors of the
brewing process. Once you figure out the temperature and time
that produce your favorite cup of coffee, you can replicate
that experience over and over. No more having to chalk a bad
cup of coffee up to accidentally overheating the water or
allowing it to steep too long. For every type of coffee bean
that exists, the Clover has specifications that bring out the
best in it, every single time.

We keep talking about Clover's ability to make the perfect
tasting cup of coffee, but what are you supposed to be
tasting? Why does it matter if you brew a coffee from Kenya
differently than you brew one from Sumatra?